Monday, June 30, 2014

With the new Marvel film "Guardian's of the Galaxy" coming out soon, I recently painted a portrait of one of the main characters of the film, Groot. This post will be a quick and dirty breakdown of the piece.

As always I began with a sketch. I honestly don't know a lot about this character so I had to use a lot of reference to get him to look right.

Next I added in the color. Originally I wasn't planning on keeping the sketch in there, but I kinda liked how it ended up looking so I kept it.

Normally the last step would be to add a background and call it a day, but I felt that the piece was a bit too flat and didn't really stand out.

After some tweaking, I finally got it to a place where I was happy. And there ya go! Groot from start to finish.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Recently I finished reading the Artemis Fowl series. I know, I know what took me so long? The thing is I actually read up to the Lost Colony and then life got in the way, so I decided to start from Book One and read all the way through. I decided that I wanted to do some concepts of how I saw the characters, and one of the characters I had the most vivid image of in my head was the Trolls. I just found their description so fascinating so I had to paint one. Here's what the official Artemis Fowl Wiki page has to say on Trolls.

As you can see that is one hell of a description. With this piece I wanted to do something in my usual style, but I didn't want it to look like a normal piece that has lineart. Instead I wanted to do something a bit more painterly. However before I could get that far I needed a sketch!

Now one thing I typically have an issue with is conveying my thoughts when it comes to art. I'll have a clear idea, but the moment I try to draw it, I just can't seem to get it right. This is one of the SUPE rare instances where I was able to draw EXACTLY what I saw in mind! I was happy with my sketch so the next step was to add color.

Like I said, I wanted to avoid my typical art piece and not line the work, so I decided to block in the color in a similar fashion to how I approach a portrait. Now typically when I have a portrait I'm painting, I have reference of some sort to base the lighting and the different colors off of. With this piece, I obviously did not have that luxury, so instead I had to figure it out on my own. This was a bit of a challenge, so I knew I had to go back and add a little bit more to the painting to get it just right.

And there ya go! One troll concept from start to finish! Like I said I was really proud of this piece for two reasons. One it was one of the first times I was able to convey EXACTLY what I was thinking, and two this was the first time that I had a super clear image in my head of a book character and was actually able to show what they looked like.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

A few weeks ago when How to Train Your Dragon 2 came out, I went and saw it opening day. I absolutely LOVED the film. For those who know me, they'll know that Stitch from Lilo and Stitch is one of my favorite animated characters. Well, Chris Sanders, the man behind Stitch, is also one of the men behind the creation of Toothless, another of my favorite characters. Since I'm a big fan of Chris' work, I decided that I wanted to do another mashup piece, this time combining Stitch and Toothless. I started out with several concepts as to what a "Stitchless" might look like.

I wasn't too happy with any of these, so I decided to instead jump right into Photoshop and just begin to sketch. Initially in these concepts I tried to combine aspects of Stitch and Toothless into a new creature. I decided my best approach would be to take Stitch's design and then modify him to look more like Toothless, which resulted in this sketch.

Now that I had a sketch I was happy with, I went back and cleaned up the art.

I was pretty happy with how the lineart turned out so the next step was to add color!

Now that the color was done, the final step was to add a shadow and recreate the How to Train Your Dragon and Stitch Logos

And there we go! The finished piece! I hope you guys enjoyed seeing the process behind this one. I plan on doing more breakdowns like this in the future where I include the original concepts.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

This coming Fall, I should be attending Animation Mentor, which is this incredible online animation school. At Animation mentor you are taught animation by professionals working in the industry. There are mentors from Pixar, Dreamworks, Bluesky, Disney, ILM, Nick, etc. I'm super excited to attend, especially seeing my friends Chelsea and Nick post all of their awesome assignments this past year. Recently on the Animation Mentor facebook page, they posted a contest inspired by the World Cup. The contest was to take any rig and put it into some sort of Soccer pose (if you remember in this post I previously did some pose work inspired by AM). I've always been fascinated by some of the jumping kicks you'll see Soccer players do, so I thought it would be fun to go with a pose like that. I ended up doing a little bit of compositing to make the piece look like it was a still frame from an animation, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.